My novel-in-progress once opened this way:
The timepiece on my wrist informs me that it is four o’clock in the afternoon, marking another anniversary of the hour my life began to end. Despite the trudge of a year of days, the death of Graeme, the man I expected to love for the rest of my time on this sorry earth, pierces me even more than the moment I lost him, the random victim of a homeless man crazed by an insane society.
No, not random. I was there. I was more than there. If only I had…if only I had not…the if-onlys pillory me. It is said that pain diminishes with time, but I can testify that the ache of guilt does not. It grows until it eats your life.
Today it gets its last bite of mine.
I labored over that opening. Critique group members read the
first two chapters and said they were
hooked. I figured I had it nailed. Then Bharti added that she thought
the second sentence in the second paragraph might be a better opening. Oh,
yeah? Hmmm… And then Leslie pointed out that the "Despite the trudge" sentence threw her--too much. So I rethought the opening and came to this...
Despite the trudge of a year of days, the death of my Graeme pierces me even more than the moment he died, the random victim of a homeless man crazed by an insane culture.
No, not random. I was there. I was more than there.
If only I had…if only I had not…if-onlys torment me. It is said that pain diminishes with time, but I can testify that the ache of guilt does not. It grows until it eats your life.
Today it gets its last bite of mine.
If only…
I think it’s more intriguing this way. What do you think? I think I’m going to go with it.
Further up the river of my writing, a critique group member caused me to ditch the first chapters in a coming-of-age novel titled The Summer Boys*, set in 1958. The original started out this way (apologies in advance for all the “telling”—apparently I hadn’t quite got the hang of it back then):
The girl didn't look like a cause of death, although she was giving Jesse Carver heart palpitations. He figured her for fifteen, but she was already one of those girls a boy instantly undresses with his eyes. Jesse had a year on her, but he would have been stumped for what to do with her once undressed. He was willing to imagine, though, so he did.
She was an unexpected pleasure. Neither he nor best friend Dudley had seen love or peril on the horizon when they left Dallas five hours earlier for a summer job on the Box 8 ranch. They'd roared down the highway toward the hill country west of Kerrville in Dudley’s old ’53 Cadillac, radio bellowing rock and roll and no parents to yell "turn down that noise." The new Jamies song had said it all ...
"Well shut them books and throw 'em away
And say goodbye to dull school days
Look alive and change your ways
It's summertime summertime sum sum summertime
Summertime summertime sum sum summertime summertime
“It's time to head straight for them hills
It's time to live and have some thrills ... "
They had headed for hills but expected no thrills—not as junior ranch hands working for room and board. To a couple of suburban kids who dreamed of being ranchers, an invitation to work on a real ranch was like a pass through the Pearly Gates.
(Seems to go on and on, all that telling, doesn’t it? Baby steps.) When my critique group got to chapter 3, Richard said, “The story starts here. You should cut the first two chapters.” Was he kidding? All that material? All that exposition? The Summertime song? All that stuff the reader just had to know? No way.
But he was right. It took a few months to sink in, but finally I achieved enough distance to cut the first two chapters and weave in expositional info from them into the new beginning. Now the novel opens with…
The air was as still as it was hot; only the whir of a grasshopper’s flight disturbed the quiet. Jesse Carver felt like an overcooked chicken, his meat damn near ready to fall off his bones. Mouth so dry he didn’t have enough spit left to swallow, Jesse croaked, “That guy tryin’ to kill us?"
Dudley Miller’s answer took a while coming. “I’m beginning to wonder.”
Jesse and Dudley rested in the meager shade of a live oak tree in the south yearling pasture—wherever the hell that was. A half-dozen red-brown Hereford yearlings, broad white blazes down the centers of their empty faces, grazed on parched, yellow grass. Jesse had tried a friendly moo, but they had paid him no mind.
Jesse said, “Doesn’t seem a foreman would be leavin’ people stuck out here with no water.”
“He’s not much older than we are. Maybe Buddy ol’ buddy doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“Oh, he knows. You hear him laugh when he drove away?”
Dudley said, “You mean right after he said, ‘You ain’t troubled by snakes, are you?’”
“Yep.” Jesse tossed a stone at a clump of prickly pear cactus the size of a bushel basket. From it came a dry rustle that faded away after a few seconds. “You hear that?”
“Yeah.“
“Think it’s a rattler? “
“Sounds like it.“
Better, right? I did the rewrite, but it took someone else to see the opportunity.
And then there’s Dan the agent, whose comments led me to come up with an overarching conflict to open my speculative thriller, We the Enemy* and thus hugely improve the story throughout.
So thank you Bharti and Leslie and Richard and Dan, and Laura, and Lynn, and Deb, and all the others who have helped me see better things in my own writing.
Moral of story: if you don’t have “Other Eyes” for your writing, find some.
Please let me hear from you. If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”
* The Summer Boy and We the Enemy are represented by TriadaUS. All contents© Ray Rhamey 2004.
Thought your post was clever and inspirational. Thanks for the help. Having other eyes in this field is sometimes impossible to find, but I keep trying.
Posted by: Suzy | November 17, 2004 at 09:25 AM
Enjoy your posts. I'm wondering, however, about your novel in progress. You seem to be contridicting the very point you just made in your prior post, "Writing for Effect--setting the critical first scene.
"I was there." That's a pretty sparse, isn't it? And the rest of the paragraph doesn't add much. I don't think it should be used for the opening paragraph of a novel.
I'd also be careful about switching from present to past tense, especially so early on. Maybe changing tense after the first paragraph makes sense in the broader context of the whole story, but with only seeing the first few lines it tends be distracting at best, confusing at worse.
Posted by: John | November 17, 2004 at 12:47 PM